Iamthewalrus
iamthewalrus is the name of a notorious trolling/griefing group that operates mostly in the Club Penguin community although their operations sometimes carry over into other realms of the Internet. The group is spearheaded by Joe Rutwalruski and formed under their original name "The Collective" making use of the Club Penguin Hacking Client to cause chaos in the Club Penguin game environment. Prevalence & Notoriety While their actions and methods are largely contested and their legality disputed, members of iamthewalrus stand by their claims that the victims of their "operations" are deserving of the treatment they are given and that they also (somewhat) operate within the boundaries of the law. Their website(s) is/are hosted by a company in Luxembourg. iamthewalrus operated at it largest scale in the first half of 2009 when the group owned and managed numerous websites and blogs. Today they are not as strong number-wise and have condensed their websites into a single wiki-based community. Allowance & History on MCCP While many websites in the Club Penguin community will outright ban members of the iamthewalrus group Dracophile has said that "being a walrus is not grounds for an immediate ban". This statement was a contradiction of a previous declaration posted by Dracophile that belittled and demeaned the organization calling their methods "childish" or "amateur" (MCCP, The Walruses, and You). Dracophile spoke with Joe Rutwalruski and after their exchange of words iamthewalrus was allowed on MCCP, the aforementioned announcement was deleted and replaced with a lighthearted self-defeating message (MCCP, The Walruses, and You: A Story of Putting Your Foot in Your Mouth), and MCCP was declared a "neutral ground" where members were allowed to post and converse with community members. However despite these claims of openness several iamthewalrus members ended up banned for actions they performed outside of MCCP which raised many concerns that Dracophile wasn't holding to his word. Dracophile stated that the members who were banned were banned for using the personal information of MCCP moderators to harass them, an act that he considered to be a violation of the rule that protects MCCP staff members from harassment of any kind. Operation MCCP In the summer of 2009 iamthewalrus announced on their wiki they had plans to launch a massive spam attack against MCCP, going as far as to give a date and time (July 3, 2009 - all day). The announcement of the attack concerned Dracophile as the raid would most certainly violate the "neutral ground" agreement. On the iamthewalrus website the details they announced included a spam attack involving memes, child pornography, images that would break the forum display by being very tall or wide, offensive graphics, profanity, and links to websites that are potentially harmful to computers. In response to these claims Dracophile quietly began work modifying code or purposefully breaking functionalities of the forums so things such as URLs or images could not be posted at all by anyone; he called this "Limited Functionality Mode" and MCCP ran as such for 3 days - the day of the "attack", the day before, and the day after. The unofficial MCCP chat room The Important Snakes was also put on high alert for the day as well. The announcement of a raid from iamthewalrus was a hoax, however, and was instead a cover-up for an attack they carried out on somebody else. MCCP operated in Limited Functionality Mode nonetheless and the forums were restored when the threat had passed. The safeguards Dracophile created for the raid remain in their "disabled" mode and are only a few clicks away from being re-activated if need be. Category:Groups